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Coming Up With a Great Business Idea

Anyone can come up with a great business idea and it doesn’t require special skills or special knowledge. Did you know that 80 percent of the world’s Top 100 Innovations were brought about by people who thought that they were not creative at all, in addition to having no experience in the field that their innovation belonged to. Thus the notion that great ideas only come from great minds is a complete myth. Don’t let Hollywood fool you.

At the heart of every big idea is someone that is no more creative, no more motivated, and no more special than anyone else. So, coming up with business ideas is really not an art, it is a science. And like any science, you can study it, you can learn it and you can eventually master it. There is not a lot of genius required.

Let us look at the basis of a great business idea in a little more detail.

First, start around things that you are really passionate about. If you look at the lives of great entrepreneurs, you would always find that at the core of their business success was their passion for the job that they are doing. Steve Jobs couldn’t have made the first Macintosh computer in his garage if he wasn’t passionate about consumer computing. So, this is the core of a great business idea: you have to really love what you are doing.

On the other hand, if you start a business just to make money, you will quit when things get really hard. And things do tend to get very hard for startups. This is where the drive given by your passion for your idea comes in and pulls you through.

Then comes the magnitude of the problem. Most startups tend to revolve around helping people deal with solving a problem that they deal with regularly. So, the greater is the size of the problem you are dealing with, the more people are going to opt for your solutions. This in turn would mean that you will generate bigger revenues. This is particularly important if you are building an online venture where most of the revenue comes from ads and/or subscriptions. Craigslist wouldn’t have been up for this long if it didn’t deal with the problem the scale of a lack of online classifieds.

Thirdly, your idea should be well-researched. You wouldn’t want to go to an incubator with a half-baked idea and get rejected straight away (Shark Tank, anybody?). You should always assess the viability of your solution and research for potential competitors. It is important to understand that many established companies might not be offering your exact solution at the moment, but they can always diversify and become a force to reckon with in the niche of your startup. Also, the viability of your solution is paramount. You can sit down with a business major in your college and get to know about the finance side, or speak with an engineer on the design area of your product. So, a good idea is a well-prepared idea and nothing tops through research in preparation.

So, if your business idea fulfills the aforementioned three points, then you might have a winnable startup in the making!